Rather than manually trawling many torrent sites hunting for material, most will agree it’s much more convenient for the content to come to the user, especially when it’s possible to take advantage of the RSS feature built into many BitTorrent clients.

TVNanny is a site dedicated to indexing various torrent sites around the world and bringing the latest in TV torrents to its users, as quickly as possible after they appear on the web.

It’s easy to sign up to TVNanny. Simply enter a username and a password along with an email address (no validation required) and registration is complete.

Clicking on the ‘Shows’ button reveals a fairly comprehensive list of TV shows, currently numbering nearly 200. Popular shows are highlighted, as are shows which have new episodes freshly indexed during the previous 24 hours. Clicking on any show name displays a page giving some detail about the plot, the actors involved and other useful information. More comprehensive reading material is made easily available by the TV.com link provided at the bottom of each page.

Once the ‘Subscribe’ button is clicked, the ‘subscriptions’ page appears where it’s possible to indicate the season and episode numbers to be monitored, the desired quality (ranging from TVRip to HDTV) and a convenient release name filter. The page supplies the URL of a custom RSS feed tailored to the user’s subscriptions which can be entered into the RSS section of a BitTorrent client such as uTorrent or Azureus, providing automatic downloads as soon as the required episodes are indexed.

In the unlikely event that a certain show doesn’t appear, requests for the indexing of new shows can be made via the ‘Suggest a new show’ button.

For users who operate a client that doesn’t support the downloading of .torrent files via RSS, the TVNanny site provides a standalone piece of software which will work alongside the existing torrent client. Those using a client like uTorrent which already has RSS support can find additional information about the feature on the official uTorrent site.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Unfortunately, several popular torrent sites carried advertising for these bad clients but thankfully, sites like The Pirate Bay saw the damage these things can cause and removed the adverts. TPB’s brokep wrote, “We’re getting a lot of email about people downloading torrent clients that are advertised on the site. Do not download them! We have put a ban for the ad companies to sell ads for these clients on our site.” Mininova and Snarf-it also blocked the adverts.

In February, we reported on yet another client, TorrentQ after a tip-off from the owner of BT-Junkie. Of course, this wasn’t a new client but the old one with a new name.

In April, in order to try to save unsuspecting file-sharers from installing malware, we ran Google Adword campaigns on the BitRoll, Torrent101 and TorrentQ websites, informing people of just how bad these clients are. Google apparantly doesn’t like to be associated with bad news and a few days later, Adsense adverts disappeared from the sites.

Disappointingly, we are now exposed to yet another ‘new’ bad torrent client. Get-Torrent is the latest in a sequence of malware-laden torrent clients, cloned from the same infected DNA as BitRoll, Torrent101 and TorrentQ. As can be seen from the client’s ‘skinning’ pages, these products are identical;

As we promised in our earlier posts, every time a bad client appears we will do our best to let the BitTorrent community know about it. Anyone thinking of installing a BitTorrent client should stay away from these products and install a free, clean client, such as uTorrent.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The maximum upload speed is by far the most important setting. It might sound strange to some, but you should always cap your upload speed to reach the best download speeds. Your connection is (sort of) like a pipeline (or tube if you prefer), if you max out your upload speed the pipe will be fully used, which means there’s not enough space left for the files you are downloading. The calculator recommends to set it at 80% of your maximum, I agree with that. People with high-speed connections might go a bit higher, and set is at 85% or even 90%.

Some people find that when they are seeding, browsing the web becomes sluggish. This is due to a badly configured upload speed in their BitTorrent client. When you have the correct upload speed entered into your client, browsing the web is noticeably quicker and seeding becomes almost transparent.

How to configure your maximum upload speed?

uTorrent: options > preferences > connection
Azureus: tools > options > transfer
Bitcomet: try this ?

Here at TorrentFreak we also wrote some post about optimizing BitTorrent download speeds, might be worth the read if you want to know more.

Read more on optimizing your BitTorrent Speed.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

A comment posted on Mostly Muppet yesterday (the 27th) has brought up the issue once again:

Dreamhost shut down my BitTorrent set-up before I even got a chance to use it. I have 3 personal videos that I made and was planning to distribute. I installed broadcast machine and was in the middle of uploading the torrents when dreamhost shut me down.

Frank, the commenter tried to run the EFF‘s Broadcast Machine, a tool many podcasters use to distribute their content over BitTorrent, on his server. A huge benefit of offering media files for download over BitTorrent is that it takes the load off your server and decreases the chance of your site becomming inaccessible due to excessive bandwidth consumption. It can become quite a costly affair if you surpass the bandwidth limit set by your host.

He contacted Dreamhost’s support with his problem. Here’s an excerpt of their reply:

BitTorrent is strictly forbidden, both as a client and as a server right now. Although we are looking into it, it’s forbidden. I believe the misunderstanding, was that what you just pasted hinted at a policy of “If we don’t notice, go what you want.” Although some people can get away with that, it is still something that is not allowed.

It seems like there’s a lot of confusion over at Dreamhost HQ on whether running a BitTorrent tracker is or isn’t allowed. After the whole escapade last year, Dreamhost said it would update its Terms Of Service to accomodate the technology, sadly the agreement still says that the use of “BitTorrent software [is] not encouraged.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Check it out.

More speed tips:
Speed up Bitcomet and uTorrent
Speed up your torrents
Speed up your torrents II

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.